Pyramid Technology

Last updated

Pyramid Technology Corporation was a computer company that produced a number of RISC-based minicomputers at the upper end of the performance range. [1] It was based in the San Francisco Bay Area of California

Contents

They also became the second company to ship a multiprocessor UNIX system (branded DC/OSx), in 1985, which formed the basis of their product line into the early 1990s. Pyramid's OSx was a dual-universe UNIX which supported programs and system calls from both 4.xBSD and AT&T's UNIX System V. [2]

History

Pyramid Technology was formed in 1981 by a number of ex-Hewlett-Packard employees, who were interested in building first-rate minicomputers based on RISC designs.

Pyramid licensed its multiprocessor bus technology to Fujitsu/ICL in 1993, also entering into a marketing partnership in certain markets that would see ICL sell Pyramid server products and offer integration services with ICL's existing mainframe products. Such sales arrangements were to continue into 1994, by which time ICL was to have implemented Pyramid's technology in its own SPARC products, in contrast with the MIPS architecture of existing Pyramid systems. [3]

In March 1995, Pyramid was bought by Siemens AG and merged into their Siemens Computer Systems US unit. [4] [5] [6] In 1998, this unit was split, with the services side of the operation becoming Wincor Nixdorf. In 1999 Siemens and Fujitsu merged their computer operations to form Fujitsu Siemens Computers, and finally Amdahl was added to the mix in 2000.

Products

90x

The first Pyramid Technology series of minicomputers was released in August 1983 [7] [8] as the 90x superminicomputer, which used their custom 32-bit scalar processor running at 8 MHz.

Although the architecture was marketed as a RISC machine, it was actually microprogrammed. It used a "sliding window" register model based on the Berkeley RISC processor, but memory access instructions had complex operation modes that could require many cycles to run. Many register-to-register scalar instructions were executed in a single machine cycle. Initially, floating point instructions were executed totally in microcode, although an optional floating point unit on a separate circuit board was released later. Microprogramming also allowed other non-RISC luxuries such as block move instructions.

Programs had access to 64 registers, and many instructions were triadic. Sixteen registers (registers 48 to 63) were referred to as "global registers" and they correspond to the registers of a typical CPU, in that they are static and always visible. The other 48 registers were actually the top of the subroutine stack. Thirty-two of them (0–31) were local registers for the current subroutine, and registers 32–47 were used to pass up to 16 parameters to the next subroutine called. During a subroutine call, the register stack moved up 32 words, so the caller's registers 32–47 became the called subroutine's registers 0–15. The return instruction dropped the stack by 32 words so return parameters would be visible to the caller in registers 32–47. The stack cache held 16 levels in the CPU and stack overflow and underflow was automatically handled by the microcode of the CPU. The programming model had two stacks, one for the register stack, and one for subroutine local variables. One grew up from a designated address in the middle of the address space, and the other grew down from the top of the user mode address space.

The 90x could accommodate four memory boards, initially holding 1 MB each. This was considered to be a lot of memory at the time, but the RISC-like architecture resulted in bigger programs than earlier architectures so most machines were sold with the memory slots full. Fortunately, the 1 MB memory boards had RAM in sockets, so they could be upgraded to 4 MB units when bigger dynamic RAM devices became available shortly after the 90x's initial release.

The 90x competed with the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) VAX 11/780 which was the preferred platform for running UNIX in the early 1980s. The 90x processor benchmarked at roughly twice the speed of the VAX, and sold for about half the price. Pyramid was indirectly assisted by DEC's reluctance to sell VAX machines without the VMS operating system, for which they charged a considerable amount of money. Many universities wanted to run UNIX rather than VMS, so Pyramid's higher performance and lower price, coupled with artificial delivery delays or surcharges from DEC, helped them to make the risky decision to buy from a new manufacturer.

One of the 90x's biggest advantages over the competition was its asynchronous serial port controller (the ITS or Intelligent Terminal Server) based on a 16-bit bit-slice processor. The ITS interfaced to 16 serial ports, and it could run them at very high speeds, using DMA to feed from daisy-chained output data blocks. A machine could have many ITSs installed, each one with its own I/O processor. Other machines at the time (including the 11/780) required CPU intervention every few bytes for interactive users, which added significantly to the system component of the CPU load. As a result, the 90x scored very well on benchmarks with a realistic amount of serial I/O.

The disk and magnetic tape controllers were actually 16-bit third-party Multibus controllers fitted into a socket in a U-shaped bus-adapter board.

Most early systems were delivered with the 470 MB Fujitsu Eagle disk drive and a slot-loading reel-to-reel streaming tape drive.

Just like the VAX 11/780, which had a PDP-11/03 with a 8-inch (200 mm) floppy disk as its console processor, the 90x had a "System Support Processor", based on a Motorola 68000, that loaded the microcode from an 5.25-inch (133 mm) floppy disk when the system was started. It was also able to run a suite of diagnostics over the system. It had a modem which allowed remote analysis by the manufacturer. The software run by the administrative processor was initially called the Totally Unrealistic Remote Diagnostic. This name was changed some years later.

A minimal system was delivered in a single 19-inch (480 mm) rack about 60-inch (1,500 mm) high with the card cage in the bottom, the disk drive in the middle, the tape drive above it, then the 2 inch high control panel with a floppy disk drive and ignition key on the top. This was considered very compact at the time. At least one machine in Australia spend six months installed in a retired outdoor lavatory with an air-conditioner replacing the louvered window and the system console terminal sitting on top of the cabinet. Administration tasks were performed al-fresco. The only indicator on the control panel was an 8 segment bar graph LED display that displayed average CPU usage when the machine was running and a "Cylon Eye" pattern when the machine stopped unexpectedly. The machine was low enough that the console (a monochrome asynchronous terminal) could rest on top.

98x

The 90x was fairly quickly followed by the 98x which was identical except that the processor clock speed was increased to 10 MHz.

Initially a single processor system like its predecessor, the 98x became Pyramid's first SMP in 1986. Several machines in the series were released, from the 1-CPU 9805 to the 4-CPU 9845, over a period of years from 1985 to 1987. The fully loaded 9845 ran at about 25  MIPS, a respectable figure for the era, though not competitive with high-end supercomputers.

Addressing the growing but cost-sensitive workstation/server market, Pyramid introduced the WorkCenter in 1986, essentially a half-height, lower cost version of the 98x with a horizontally mounted 9-track tape drive and 8-inch (200 mm) disk drive(s). [9]

All early Pyramid 9xxx systems - from the 90x to the 9810 - used the same physical bus and were field upgradeable. [10]

MIServer

Like many of the early multiprocessor vendors, Pyramid turned to "commodity" RISC CPUs when they started to become practical. Pyramid continued to use their own RISC design until the release of the MIServer S product line. Pyramid released a series of register window-based machines as a 9000 line follow on. These were known as the MIServer starting in 1989. They supported up to ten CPUs with performance of about 12 MIPS each. The MIServer was replaced in 1991/2 with the MIServerT and later followed up with the MIServer S and ES, Pyramid's first R3000-based machine. The first machines in the series shipped with anywhere from 4 to 12 R3000s running at 33 MHz, with top-end performance around 140 MIPS. Later high-end MIServer ES machines had up to 24 CPUs, also at 33 MHz. The operating system for the MIPS based systems was DC/OSx, a port of AT&T System V Release 4 (SVR4).

Nile series

The release of the 150 MHz 64-bit R4400 led to the 2–16-CPU Nile series in late 1993. With each CPU capable of 92 MIPS, the Nile systems were true supercomputers. Their last product, the Reliant RM 1000, known internally as the Meshine, was just coming to market when Siemens bought them. The RM1000 was a massive parallel processing (MPP) computer. Each node ran its own instance of Reliant UNIX DC/OSx. This system had a two-axis mesh architecture. The RM1000 used software called ICF to manage the cluster interconnects. ICF went on to provide the cluster foundation in the PrimeCluster HA software which is still developed and available from Fujitsu Siemens.

Each compute node in the mesh used a single MIPS R10000 CPU, however enhancements to the RM1000 allowed for the NILE SMP machines to be included into the mesh as "fat" nodes. The compute nodes were physically installed in the HAAS-3 frames that shipped as drive arrays with the earlier Nile product. Each compute node controlled six SCSI disks as the primary controller and another six disks as a secondary controller. The frame with up to six compute nodes or four compute nodes and two Nile attach gateways was connected to neighboring frames with short ribbon cables. A HAAS-3 frame with compute nodes installed was called a cell. The cells locked together and could be stacked two high and end to end as far as space permitted. Four cells together were known as a ton and systems were referred to by the number of tons they contained. The largest mesh constructed at Pyramid was a test system containing 214 CPUs including four Nile SMP nodes.

Although the RM1000 was eventually discontinued and not replaced by Siemens, customers who had large installations such as a large UK telecommunications company took a long time to find suitable replacements for these massively parallel systems due to their massive I/O and computing capabilities.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DEC Alpha</span> 64-bit RISC instruction set architecture

Alpha is a 64-bit reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Alpha was designed to replace 32-bit VAX complex instruction set computers (CISC) and to be a highly competitive RISC processor for Unix workstations and similar markets.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Minicomputer</span> Mid-1960s–late-1980s class of smaller computers

A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a type of smaller general-purpose computer developed in the mid-1960s and sold at a much lower price than mainframe and mid-size computers from IBM and its direct competitors. In a 1970 survey, The New York Times suggested a consensus definition of a minicomputer as a machine costing less than US$25,000, with an input-output device such as a teleprinter and at least four thousand words of memory, that is capable of running programs in a higher level language, such as Fortran or BASIC.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reduced instruction set computer</span> Processor executing one instruction in minimal clock cycles

In electronics and computer science, a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) is a computer architecture designed to simplify the individual instructions given to the computer to accomplish tasks. Compared to the instructions given to a complex instruction set computer (CISC), a RISC computer might require more instructions in order to accomplish a task because the individual instructions are written in simpler code. The goal is to offset the need to process more instructions by increasing the speed of each instruction, in particular by implementing an instruction pipeline, which may be simpler to achieve given simpler instructions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">VAX</span> Line of computers sold by Digital Equipment Corporation

VAX is a series of computers featuring a 32-bit instruction set architecture (ISA) and virtual memory that was developed and sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the late 20th century. The VAX-11/780, introduced October 25, 1977, was the first of a range of popular and influential computers implementing the VAX ISA. The VAX family was a huge success for DEC, with the last members arriving in the early 1990s. The VAX was succeeded by the DEC Alpha, which included several features from VAX machines to make porting from the VAX easier.

The NS32000, sometimes known as the 32k, is a series of microprocessors produced by National Semiconductor. The first member of the family came to market in 1982, briefly known as the 16032 before becoming the 32016. It was the first general-purpose microprocessor on the market that used 32-bit data internally: the Motorola 68000 had 32-bit registers and instructions to perform 32-bit arithmetic, but used a 16-bit ALU for arithmetic operations on data, and thus took twice as long to perform those arithmetic operations. However, the 32016 contained many bugs and often could not be run at its rated speed. These problems, and the presence of the otherwise similar 68000 which had been available since 1980, led to little use in the market.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Workstation</span> High-end single-user computer

A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term workstation has been used loosely to refer to everything from a mainframe computer terminal to a PC connected to a network, but the most common form refers to the class of hardware offered by several current and defunct companies such as Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Apollo Computer, DEC, HP, NeXT, and IBM which powered the 3D computer graphics revolution of the late 1990s.

Tandem Computers, Inc. was the dominant manufacturer of fault-tolerant computer systems for ATM networks, banks, stock exchanges, telephone switching centers, 911 systems, and other similar commercial transaction processing applications requiring maximum uptime and no data loss. The company was founded by Jimmy Treybig in 1974 in Cupertino, California. It remained independent until 1997, when it became a server division within Compaq. It is now a server division within Hewlett Packard Enterprise, following Hewlett-Packard's acquisition of Compaq and the split of Hewlett-Packard into HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DEC PRISM</span> RISC instruction set architecture

PRISM was a 32-bit RISC instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). It was the outcome of a number of DEC research projects from the 1982–1985 time-frame, and the project was subject to continually changing requirements and planned uses that delayed its introduction. This process eventually decided to use the design for a new line of Unix workstations. The arithmetic logic unit (ALU) of the microPrism version had completed design in April 1988 and samples were fabricated, but the design of other components like the floating point unit (FPU) and memory management unit (MMU) were still not complete in the summer when DEC management decided to cancel the project in favor of MIPS-based systems. An operating system codenamed MICA was developed for the PRISM architecture, which would have served as a replacement for both VAX/VMS and ULTRIX on PRISM.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">International Computers Limited</span> British computer company (1968-2002)

International Computers Limited (ICL) was a British computer hardware, computer software and computer services company that operated from 1968 until 2002. It was formed through a merger of International Computers and Tabulators (ICT), English Electric Computers (EEC) and Elliott Automation in 1968. The company's most successful product line was the ICL 2900 Series range of mainframe computers.

The Advanced Computing Environment (ACE) was defined by an industry consortium in the early 1990s to be the next generation commodity computing platform, the successor to personal computers based on Intel's 32-bit instruction set architecture. The effort found little support in the market and dissolved due to infighting within the group and a lack of sales.

The AT&T Hobbit is a microprocessor design developed by AT&T Corporation in the early 1990s. It was based on the company's CRISP design resembling the classic RISC pipeline, and which in turn grew out of the C Machine design by Bell Labs of the late 1980s. All were optimized for running code compiled from the C programming language. The design concentrates on fast instruction decoding, indexed array access, and procedure calls.

Berkeley RISC is one of two seminal research projects into reduced instruction set computer (RISC) based microprocessor design taking place under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency VLSI Project. RISC was led by David Patterson at the University of California, Berkeley between 1980 and 1984. The other project took place a short distance away at Stanford University under their MIPS effort starting in 1981 and running until 1984.

SINIX is a discontinued variant of the Unix operating system from Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme. SINIX supersedes SIRM OS and Pyramid Technology's DC/OSx. Following X/Open's acceptance that its requirements for the use of the UNIX trademark were met, version 5.44 and subsequent releases were published as Reliant UNIX by Fujitsu Siemens Computers.

The Orion was a series of 32-bit super-minicomputers designed and produced in the 1980s by High Level Hardware Limited (HLH), a company based in Oxford, UK. The company produced four versions of the machine:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sony NEWS</span> UNIX workstation series

The Sony NEWS is a series of Unix workstations sold during the late 1980s and 1990s. The first NEWS machine was the NWS-800, which originally appeared in Japan in January 1987 and was conceived as a desktop replacement for the VAX series of minicomputers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of general-purpose CPUs</span>

The history of general-purpose CPUs is a continuation of the earlier history of computing hardware.

The ICL Series 39 was a range of mainframe and minicomputer computer systems released by the UK manufacturer ICL in 1985. The original Series 39 introduced the "S3L" processors and microcodes, and a nodal architecture, which is a form of Non-Uniform Memory Access.

Encore Computer was an early pioneer in the parallel computing market, based in Marlborough, Massachusetts. Although offering several system designs beginning in 1985, they were never as well known as other companies in this field such as Pyramid Technology, Alliant, and the most similar systems Sequent and FLEX.

DC/OSx (DataCenter/OSx) is a discontinued Unix operating system for MIPS based systems developed by Pyramid Technology in 1989. It ran on its Nile series of SMP machines and was a port of AT&T System V Release 4 (SVR4). In 1995, Pyramid Technology was acquired by Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme (SNI), and DC/OSx was superseded by the SINIX operating system.

The ICL DRS was a range of departmental computers from International Computers Limited (ICL). Standing originally for Distributed Resource System, the full name was later dropped in favour of the abbreviation.

References

  1. ↑ Pyramid Unveils Disk Sharing Plan For IBM PC, Macs, Sun Workstations, By Sharon Fisher, Page 34, InfoWorld, 17 Nov 1986
  2. ↑ AT&T and Pyramid will develop server line: Deal allows AT&T to remarket Pyramid Line, Page 40, InfoWorld, 16 Oct 1989
  3. ↑ Halper, Mark (15 February 1993). "Pyramid builds partnerships with ICL units". Computerworld. p. 73. Retrieved 1 June 2024.
  4. ↑ COMPANY NEWS; SIEMENS IS IN TALKS TO BUY PYRAMID TECHNOLOGY, Published: January 10, 1995, The New York Times Company
  5. ↑ COMPANY NEWS; SIEMENS AGREES TO PURCHASE PYRAMID TECHNOLOGY, Published: January 24, 1995, The New York Times Company
  6. ↑ Siemens/Pyramid seek to raise profile, By Michael Goldberg, Computerworld, 12 Feb 1996, The acquisition last March
  7. ↑ Supports Up to 128 Users Pyramid 32-Bit Mini Designed for Unix, Page 73, Computerworld, 15 Aug 1983, ...has unwrapped a 32-bit, ...minicomputer...Pyramid 90x...
  8. ↑ Position advert: Pyramid Systems Support Specialist, Page 184, Computerworld, 12 Sep 1983, Pyramid Technology Corporation, a new Mountain View, California company focused on ... has recently announced its first product: the Pyramid 90x computer.
  9. ↑ Enterprise, I. D. G. (1986-02-17). Computerworld. IDG Enterprise.
  10. ↑ "Pyramid 9810 brochure (pdf)" (PDF). Computer History Archive. Retrieved 15 January 2022.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.